Helen Whately MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Jul 2025 · Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill · Hansard source

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  This has been an extraordinary afternoon in the Chamber. Listening to the debate, we have surely all been moved by the stories we have heard of the experiences of hon. Members, of the experiences of their families, loved ones and constituents, and of how the welfare system has served its vital purpose of providing a safety net in times of desperate need, particularly for people whose disabilities or ill health have made it impossible for them to make ends meet on their own. It is clear that there is broad consensus across the House that the welfare system needs reform. There has also been consensus that what we were debating was a bad Bill. It was a rushed and chaotic compromise that would harm disabled people, create a two-tier benefit system, and barely make a dent in the overall welfare bill. How could anyone justify voting for something that would not make a single disabled person’s life better? It is clear that many, many Members could not. I said that it “was” a bad Bill, because while we have been debating it, it has more or less disintegrated. Less than two hours ago, the Minister for Social Security and Disability told us, in an unprecedented intervention, that clause 5 of the Bill is to be removed in Committee. That takes out all the changes to personal independence payment, and with them almost the entirety of the remaining savings in the Bill. Describing it as chaos now feels like an understatement. We have a Government with a supermajority who were voted in on a manifesto for change, a welfare system that everyone agrees needs reform, and public finances that simply must be brought under control, but the Government are now serving up a Bill with next to nothing in it. They had already U-turned once; it seems they cannot even deliver a U-turn. The Prime Minister told the country that he was distracted at NATO, and he flew back home on Thursday to sort the problem out. This is what sorting it out looks like. Once again, his calamitous negotiations are letting the country down. Last week, we offered the Prime Minister help in the national interest and set out three tests that he would need to meet to have our support on welfare legislation. The first was that the welfare bill must come down. We all know people whose lives would not be possible without the help that our welfare system provides. Each and every one of us in the Chamber wants a welfare system that is there for those who need it, but if the welfare bill spirals out of control, it puts that support in jeopardy. The Bill now makes no meaningful changes to a system that we all agree is not working, and I reckon it will now save less than £1 billion from a sickness benefits bill that will be rising to nearly £100 billion by the end of the decade. That is a total dereliction of duty by a Government who claim to want welfare reform and fiscal discipline. Secondly, we said that we would support plans that get people into work, but the Bill will not help a single person into work. Ministers said, “Trust us, employment support is coming,” but why would anyone trust this Government on jobs when 100,000 were lost in May alone? None of us have seen the Government’s plan to get more disabled people into work, and apart from new red tape and making it more expensive to hire people, I do not think there is one. Thirdly, we said that we must not have more tax rises in the autumn. Given that the Chancellor had already committed to that, it should have been the simplest of those three conditions to agree to, but this desperate climbdown blows an even bigger hole in her Budget. She is pushing us into a doom loop of higher taxes, fewer jobs and more welfare. At this rate, the time is coming when our constituents will not even have a welfare system to call on in times of trouble. What is left for us to vote for or against this evening? All of us in this House know that welfare needs reform and want to see more people helped into work. All of us in this House—surely most of us, at least—recognise that the country must live within its means. The remnants of this Bill will manifestly achieve none of that. In fact, the only purpose it will now serve is to etch forever into the statute book the moment when this Government totally lost control.

• 30 Jun 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Lady for advance sight of her statement. This is a Government in chaos: open rebellion from their own Back Benchers, unfunded U-turns costing billions, and welfare plans that are not worth the paper they are written on. Their latest idea is a two-tier welfare system to trap people in a lifetime on benefits and deny them the dignity of work, while leaving the taxpayer to pick up the ever-growing bill. It is a long-held Conservative belief that those who can work, should work. Work provides security and purpose. That is why we launched universal credit, simplifying complex benefits and ensuring that work always paid. And it works. In the decade up to the pandemic, we got the number of people on benefits and the benefits bill itself down. Some 800 jobs were created for every day that we were in office, giving millions of people the dignity and security that work brings. But then, during the pandemic, we saw something new. The health and disability bit of our benefits system started to break. The bill is forecast to hit £100 billion by 2030. One in every four pounds of income tax will be spent on health and disability benefits—more than the entire defence budget. That is not fair for the taxpayer, not fair for people who are written off, and certainly not sustainable for the country. Despite Labour having 14 years in opposition and now a year in government, they still do not have a plan to bring down the welfare bill or get people into work. What we have before us now is a rushed and chaotic compromise that is not reform in any sense of the word. It is woefully unambitious about savings, conspicuously lacking in compassion and achieves no meaningful change of a system we all know is broken. Thanks to the Government’s latest climbdown, we are left with a plan that will save just £2.5 billion of a £100 billion bill by introducing a two-tier system. Two people diagnosed with Parkinson’s a week apart will now receive different levels of support—all to clear up an internal Labour argument. The Government’s own impact assessment shows that these plans will not get a single person into work. The idea that work is the guiding motivation for these changes is laughable. There are things that the Government could do. They could reform the fit note system, which sees 94% of people who apply told that they are too sick to do any work at all. They could say today that they would make all sickness benefit assessments face to face. They could get a grip of the rising claims for common mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. Claims for those and neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD are the main reason for the steep rise in the number of people on sickness benefits, making up more than half of all new claims. The Centre for Social Justice has found that the Government could save up to £9 billion by reforming those benefits. However, nothing that we have seen from Labour over the past couple of weeks suggests that it has the courage and conviction to grip that problem. In the meantime, our welfare bill will only continue to rise. We agree on the need for reform and have set out the conditions under which we would support the Government: first, the welfare budget must come down; secondly, we need to get people back into work; thirdly, there must be no new tax rises to pay for increases in welfare spending. But with the welfare bill ever growing, unemployment rising and jobs disappearing, the Bill fails on all accounts. Will the Secretary of State confirm whether the changes she is announcing today will be paid for through borrowing or taxation? Where are these good jobs she claims to be creating, when vacancies are going down and unemployment is going up? Has she read the impact assessment for the Government’s Employment Rights Bill, which makes it clear that it will be harder for people to find work as a result? Why did it take the Government a year to publish the terms of reference for their PIP assessment review, and when can we expect changes if it does not report back until autumn 2026? Could I try one more time to ask what the difference is between the Secretary of State’s right to try guarantee and our chance to work guarantee? Finally, is this it? Are there any more savings? Are the Government not going to get any more people into work? Is this the extent of their ambition for reforming the welfare system during their time in office? In five years’ time, will this be the Secretary of State’s legacy?

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement. She and I agree on one thing: the welfare bill is too high. Left unchecked, it will rise to £100 billion by the end of the decade. Spending more on sickness benefits than we do on defence is not the sign of a strong country. This is not just a question of money. We have 3 million people of working-age who are not in work due to ill health, not filling the roles businesses need, not contributing to our economy and not fulfilling their own potential. The best way to get the welfare bill down is to get people off benefits and into work. That is what we did year after year after taking office in 2010. Despite the once-in-a-century pandemic, 4 million more people were in employment when we left office than when we inherited Labour’s mess. Before the pandemic, economic inactivity was at an historic low, but it is true that we then started to see a new phenomenon: growing numbers of people, and—particularly worryingly—young people, claiming sickness benefits. A system set up with good intentions to protect the most vulnerable in society has over time morphed into something broader, driven in part by a well-intentioned but not always helpful medicalisation of life’s ups and downs. In government, we identified the problem and worked up plans to tackle it, but at every point Labour Members opposed them. In fact, the now Chancellor said that not one single penny could be saved from benefits. When they came into office, not only did they cancel or delay pretty much everything we handed over, but they had no plans of their own. They walked into the Department with empty notebooks. All they had done in opposition was oppose, instead of the hard work of coming up with their own answers. That is why the country has had to wait another eight months for this announcement. In that time, taxpayers have shelled out £7 billion in extra sickness benefits, and nearly half a million people have been signed off sick. In fact, 60 people were signed on to sickness benefits while the Secretary of State was talking. None the less, I have been looking forward to hearing what the right hon. Lady would announce today and which of the many things briefed to the media her spinning policy wheel would eventually land on. Governing is hard—we know that. In the last few weeks, the Government have made it look really hard, but that is nothing compared with how hard life can be for a severely disabled person, somebody for whom getting up, getting dressed and getting breakfast—things most of us found easy this morning—are hard if not impossible. For some people, the last few weeks have been deeply frightening. They will be glad of the uncertainty finally ending. I genuinely want the right hon. Lady to succeed, and I welcome her commitment today to increasing the number of reassessments and to having more of them face to face and recorded. I welcome the investment in employment support for disabled people. I welcome, of course, her reannouncing a host of things that we were doing in government. Scrapping the work capability assessment and creating a single assessment is already Government policy that is due to come in in 2026-27. Her big idea seems to be to delay that until 2028. Merging new-style jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance into a new time-limited higher rate is a proposal that we worked up in government. We launched a consultation on tightening up eligibility for PIP and, by the way, we would have gone much further with that. We consulted on ending reassessments for people whose health conditions will not improve, and the right to try guarantee sounds remarkably similar to our chance to work guarantee. Of course, on the Secretary of State’s continued support for WorkWell, I launched that programme with the now shadow Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride). In fact, the only original idea I can see in the entire announcement is increasing the rate of unemployment benefits—a Labour policy if ever I have heard one. This is a now-or-never chance to seize the moment—a now or never for millions of people who will otherwise be signed off for what could end up being a lifetime on benefits—but today’s announcement leaves me with more questions than answers. How many people will be helped back into work and by when? Surely we have not been waiting eight months for just another Green Paper. Where is the fit note reform crucial to stem the flow of people on to benefits? Where is the action on people being signed off sick for the everyday ups and downs of life? Why is the right hon. Lady planning to save only £5 billion when the bill is forecast to rise to over £100 billion? Do the savings she is announcing today include the £5 billion we had already agreed with the OBR for reforming the work capability assessment? If so, she has made virtually no savings of her own. What is the net saving given the additional expenditure planned? Fundamentally, this is too little, too late. The fact is that £5 billion just does not cut it with a bill so big going up so fast. She needed to be tougher. She should be saying, “No more hard-working taxpayers funding the family next-door not to work, no free top-of-the-range cars for people who do not need them, no more sickfluencers helping people to claim money they do not need.” Before the right hon. Lady puts on her angry voice and leans across the Dispatch Box to shout at me about “14 years”, I gently say to her that everybody in this Chamber and around the country knows that we lost and Labour won. Her job now is to govern and mine is to hold her to account. Our country needs everybody who can work to do so. That principle should be at the heart of our welfare system. It is good for the taxpayer, good for the economy and good for the individual and their family, who benefit from security, dignity and purpose that work brings, and it means that those who genuinely cannot work get the support that they deserve. The fact is that fewer people work under Labour. That has happened every time Labour has been in office, and it is already happening now. The Government should have taken their time in opposition to come up with meaningful reforms, but they did not, and the country is already paying the price.

• 3 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill · Hansard source

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  A strongly held Conservative principle is that public money must not be wasted. We hold this view not because we are mean, but because the Government do not have money of their own. What they have, they raise through taxation from all of us. A tiny fraction of every penny that they spend is yours, mine and everyone else’s who pays in. Those who spend public money have a duty to spend it wisely, and ensure that it ends up only with those who should have it, for the purpose for which it was intended. In a big, complex system of government in a country of nearly 70 million people, from time to time that will not happen for a range of reasons—from a form that has been accidentally filled in with the wrong information, or a change of circumstance that someone forgot to notify the jobcentre about, to serious organised fraud—but however taxpayers have lost out, it is incumbent on the state to do all that it can to get their money back. That is what taxpayers rightly expect. It is part of the unwritten contract for collecting that money in the first place. Therefore, it will be no surprise to hear that, in principle, we support the Bill’s aim. In fact, much of the Bill continues work that we did in government, and legislation that was interrupted by the election. It is important to put what we are discussing today in context. Before the pandemic, fraud and error across the DWP benefits and tax credit system was at a near record low, but then we had two national crises—first, the pandemic, then war in Ukraine—which piled huge cost of living pressures on families across the UK. During both, we acted rapidly. We set up never-seen-before systems of support in record time. We protected millions of people’s jobs. We paid half of everyone’s energy bills for a year. We got direct payments to the people who needed them the most. I am proud of what we did, and I think that history will look back kindly on how we supported people through those times, but the truth is that when we do something fast at a moment of crisis, that inevitably opens up new vulnerabilities in the system. Disappointingly, against a national spirit of getting through hard times together, some people saw it as a chance to make a quick buck, and we saw a material increase in the amount being lost to fraud within the system. Any and all of us could spell out better uses for that money. That is why, back in May 2022, we published our plan, “Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System”. We increased the number of frontline counter-fraud professionals in the DWP, created a new Public Sector Fraud Authority and started work on new legal powers to investigate and punish fraudsters. It was a good start. In 2022-23, fraud and error were cut by 10%. We saved £1 billion through the Department’s dedicated counter-fraud activities. The next year we upped that to £1.35 billion, exceeding the £1.3 billion target, yet we were still not satisfied. In May last year, we published a second fraud plan to save £9 billion by 2027-28, which included hiring more staff to check claims for accuracy, modernising information-gathering powers, broadening the penalty system and investing £70 million in advanced data analytics. In April, we announced plans for a new fraud Bill to align DWP investigations with HMRC, treating benefit fraud like tax fraud and giving investigators new powers to make seizures and arrests. When the general election was called, the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill had already passed through the House of Commons. The Bill included the powers the Government are introducing today to require third parties, such as banks, to provide relevant information to the DWP. To the extent that this Bill continues that work, I do not envisage substantial disagreement—albeit we have questions on how the law will work in practice. I also have serious concerns about the powers that the Cabinet Office is giving itself. Before I deal with those, let me say that I recognise the concerns that people have about the state getting too much information about their finances. Privacy should never be taken lightly. I do not want to live in a country where the Government can access our bank accounts and look at what we have been spending our money on, and I would not support a Bill that would allow the Government to do that, but I believe that it is right for the DWP to learn lessons from HMRC to recoup taxpayers’ money. The fact of the matter is that if someone receives money from the state, it is not unreasonable for the state to investigate if there are signs they are taking money that they should not be. As I said, I have some questions about how the social security powers in the Bill will be put into practice, and I expect to probe those matters further as the Bill progresses. For instance, on the role of banks, how much testing has been done of the systems that they expect to use? The Horizon scandal is a recent reminder of how computer systems do not always get it right. What progress has been made on the code of conduct, and when will we see it? I also note that no impact assessment has been done on the cost to banks. Has the Minister met the sector and discussed what the changes mean for it? I know there are concerns within the sector about the lack of detail brought forward by the DWP. If the maximum level of scrutiny allowed under the Bill is demanded by the DWP, how would that work in practice for banks and what would it cost? On the sanctions that can be meted out under the Bill, we support the Department for Work and Pensions being given further powers to pursue recovery outside of benefits and PAYE, but are the measures outlined in the Bill tough enough? Why is 40% the maximum amount of someone’s capital that can be reclaimed? Allowing for hardship, which the Bill does, why should someone potentially keep the majority of their ill-gotten gains? It is not clear how the Bill intends to treat carer’s allowance overpayments, which I know from my time as Care Minister are complicated and often accidental, though unfortunately not always. None the less, they are a loss to the taxpayer that should be investigated. We would like to understand in more detail how the savings we are told to expect from the Bill will accrue. How many people does the Government think that will affect, and what proportion is it of the fraud currently being perpetrated? I was concerned the other day to see reports in the media of a number of artificial intelligence schemes being quietly shelved in the Department. It is noticeable that the plans rely heavily on human labour to root out fraud. While I know the Government have to create jobs somehow, I would be interested to hear what consideration has been given to automating some of the processes in future. That too will help ensure that taxpayers’ money does not go to waste. I come to my main area of concern, which is the powers being given to Cabinet Office Ministers and the Public Sector Fraud Authority. I know what it is like to make legislation thinking that I, as a good person, would only use it wisely, but I also know what it is like to be wrongly investigated by a public authority on the grounds of a misleading newspaper article. Looking at the investigatory powers bestowed in chapter 2 of the Bill, how could one not be worried to see a Minister being given powers, with little oversight, to compel a person to release whatever information they wish, in any format demanded, within 10 days, along with the information of anyone connected to them, on any grounds that the Minister deems “reasonable”—and to disclose that information to whomever they think necessary, with the sole right of appeal being only to that Minister? It could be impossible for someone to comply within the timeframe given, yet the Bill includes fines set at £300 a day for missing the deadline. Of course the Government should go after fraudsters, but I worry that some of that power could be abused and that, in its current form, it may breach laws on the state taking someone’s property without due process. I would be interested to hear if experts in the legal sector have been consulted on the legislation as drafted. Have Ministers engaged with the Law Society, the Bar Council or, for that matter, organisations like Liberty and Justice? In the Department for Work and Pensions and the Cabinet Office, it is right to pursue fraudsters with the full might of the law, but the ends cannot justify all means and the process must always be fair, reasonable and proportionate. I look forward to further discussions on the detail of the Bill, and I am sure that colleagues in the other place will be preparing for that, too. In the meantime, we must not let the Bill distract from the elephant in the room. For every penny the Bill will save—welcome though that is—it will do nothing about the billions of pounds that will be racked up in sickness benefits under this Labour Government. It is staggering that they did not come into office with a plan. They have done nothing to halt the tide in the seven months they have been in office, and I hear that they have shelved some of the work we handed over. We have heard not a murmur about what they will actually do, just briefing after briefing to the papers. Why not bring an actual plan to Parliament rather than talking to the papers? I suspect you, Madam Deputy Speaker, might agree with me on that point. We had a plan—where is theirs? Every day the Government scramble about without a plan costs taxpayers millions. Fraud and error in the system is a problem, and I am pleased to pledge the Opposition’s support for tackling them, but let us not use this Bill as a distraction from the big issue. We all agree that the welfare system needs reform. Let us end the briefings and have some action.

• 29 Jan 2025 · Welfare Cap · Hansard source

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  I will make some progress. In government, we were working flat out to tackle that problem. We were changing how we assess people’s capability for work, recognising that the world of work has changed. We developed WorkWell to help people with health conditions or disabilities find and stay in work, and we were reforming the fit notes that GPs give people. Once again, we were opposed by Labour every step of the way. We also had plans to go further. In our manifesto, we committed to £12 billion-worth of savings by reforming sickness benefits. Labour responded at the time by saying that the money is simply not there, and the present Chancellor said that not a single penny could be saved from welfare. It turns out that, on this one occasion, Labour has stuck to its word: it has no plans to control welfare spending. Today, the Government are setting a welfare cap that does not include a penny’s worth of savings at a staggering £195 billion by 2029-30—a 44% increase on this year’s cap. In cash terms, that is more than our entire defence budget. Not content with not saving a single penny, they have given themselves a £10 billion buffer on top of that. That lack of ambition is terrifying. We believe that money can and should be saved from the welfare bill. The Chancellor finally seems to agree with us, because she has been busy briefing the papers in a panic about cutting spending. But where are those plans? Unfortunately, she has not got any because, as I said, until now she did not believe any savings could be made. Perhaps the Employment Minister can give us some clues. I believe she has canned my fit note reforms, so what will she do to get the welfare bill down and by when? How on earth does she expect to get people into work when 50,000 people were added to the unemployment figures in December alone?